David Bird, chief executive of Nigeria's $20 billion Dangote refinery, said the company could expand the plant by 1.4 million barrels a day within three years, betting on a replication strategy designed to avoid cost overruns and delays that often plague large energy projects.
Speaking on Wednesday about the expansion plan, targeted for 2026, Bird said the refinery would operate in what he described as a “roofless replication” of its existing configuration, essentially copying the current design without the detailed engineering work required to reopen.
This approach, he said, will allow the company to procure and build faster by relying on proven specifications rather than having to redesign systems.
“Once you let the engineers get back into the detail, they often start tinkering, and that sends you months or years into detailed engineering,” Bird said. “The idea here is replication. We won't need to re-engineer, so we can order long lead items straight away and start manufacturing.”
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The Dangote refinery, located in the Lekki Free Trade Zone near Lagos, is already the world's largest single-train refinery, with a nameplate capacity of 650,000 barrels per day.
The expansion to 1.4 million barrels per day will strengthen its position as one of the world's largest refining complexes and significantly reshape fuel flows to Africa, a region that has long been dependent on imports for refined petroleum products.
Bird, who was appointed as the refinery's first standalone CEO, said the expansion timetable hinges on two sets of parallel activities starting immediately.
The company plans to place orders for long-lead purchase items such as major equipment and process units with the goal of completing those purchases in the first month of 2026. Also, site preparation and preliminary civil works are scheduled to begin before the end of this month.
“We're doing two things in parallel,” Bird said. “Procurement starts immediately, and at the same time we are also starting work and site preparation.”
He said a major advantage of the project is that most of the ground work has already been done.
The land earmarked for expansion has been reclaimed, raised and prepared in advance, eliminating a major source of delay in large industrial projects.
Bird credited the foresight of Nigeria's leadership, saying, “If you look at the landscape, you can see that land has already been reclaimed and has increased by more than a meter compared to before.” “That's all pre-investment. None of the normal site-preparation timelines really apply here.”
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Because of that early preparation, Bird said the refinery expects to have structural steel “come out of the ground” by the end of this year, a milestone that would typically take longer for a greenfield site to reach.
The Dangote Refinery is central to Nigeria's strategy to cut fuel imports, conserve foreign exchange and stabilize domestic fuel supplies.
Once fully operational, the existing plant is expected to meet all of Nigeria's petrol demand and export surplus products to West and Central Africa. An expansion would deepen that impact, potentially turning Nigeria into a major exporter of refined fuels.
Bird acknowledged that large-scale refinery projects globally have struggled to meet schedule and budget, but said the combination of replication, prompt procurement and land ready for construction gives the Dangote refinery a strong advantage.
“We strongly believe we can bring this expansion online within three years,” he said.
If achieved, the expansion will be one of the fastest large-scale refineries globally, underscoring the Dangote Group's ambition to establish the facility not only as a national asset, but also as a globally competitive refining hub.
